This is the TBTF Log, an experiment in reporting important breaking news
in a more timely way than was possible with the Tasty Bit of the Day. The
TBTF newsletter continues unchanged. The current issue is
TBTF for 1999-11-21: Shameless.

Friday, December 10, 1999

Wednesday, December 08, 1999

12/8/99 5:33:29 PM

thread("spx") ?>
Patent issued for psychographic profiling of users.
TBTF Irregular Gary Stock sends word of a development that nicely blends
two longtime TBTF concerns: worrisome patents and vanishing consumer
privacy.
The online marketer Be Free
has been awarded
a second business-method patent.
US Patent
No. 5,991,735, titled Computer Program Apparatus for
Determining Behavioral Profiles of a Computer User. According to
the company it covers any method for the "passive creation of viewer
profiles." So watch out, all you spammers foisting
email cookies
on the innocent and unwashed.

Funny, if you
search
the IBM database for patents issued in the name of Be Free's
co-founder, Tom Gerace, you find the company's patents mixed in with
5 others involving the processing of paint sludge. Do you suppose
this coincidence is meaningful?

Monday, December 06, 1999

12/6/99 3:24:25 PM

Credible claim of a GSM attack -- 100M cell-phone
users' privacy at risk.
Adi Shamir (the "S" in RSA) and a colleague have developed a
method
of decoding GSM cell-phone traffic, protected by the A5/1 encryption
algorithm, in real-time on a PC. Nearly 100 million European
cell-phone users rely on GSM A5/1 for their privacy, and about 130M
more worldwide use a weaker version, A5/2. Here is the Shamir/Biryukov
paper in Postscript form (292K) and in
HTML (text 44K, six images 163K).

A poster to the Cryptography list
speculated
whether the A5/1 algorithm has weaknesses built into it by design:

Other than better funding, the NSA has the advantage over us
"outsiders" in that the NSA or their European counterparts
designed A5/1 and A5/2. They didn't have to find a compromise.
They had the luxury of being able to engineer it in. Our 5
clock cycles attack against A5/2 only works because several
properties of the cipher come together just right. Chance?
Many doubt it. We can only wait and see if similar "fortunate
coincidences" play a role in the new attack against A5/1.

This story was picked up by the
NY Times
and Wired
on Tuesday, and I wrote about it that day for the Industry Standard's
Media Grokhere.

12/6/99 9:53:49 AM

What is "in plain sight?"
In the US, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (against
unreasonable searches and seizures) restricts police executing a
search warrant in a person's home to looking for evidence of a
particular, narrowly defined crime. They can't go trolling for
evidence of unrelated offences; they can't even seize and attempt to
use such evidence unless it is discovered in plain sight.

So when law enforcement officials seize a computer under a search
warrent, what does in plain sight mean with regard to a hard
disk? This Washington Post
article
airs some recent cases in which the courts have grappled with this
issue. As in many other questions of cyberspace law, according to
law professor A. Michael Froomkin,

Sunday, December 05, 1999

12/5/99 2:39:48 PM

Fast. Free. False.
This is the tagline for the new FNwire
service, which looks to be setting up camp on
The Onion's territory. This
Future News wire brings you business and technology news that might
happen, but probably won't. Headlining the first issue is Death's filing
for an IPO, complete with
SEC form S-1
Seems somewhat derivitive of The Onion's earlier
piece
on the IPO of Anabaena, "a photosynthesizing, nitrogen-fixing
algae with 1999 revenues estimated at $0 billion."

This venue represents an experiment in more timely and less "cooked"
TBTF news coverage. You'll read here things that came through my
desktop machine mere minutes before. The TBTF Log replaces the Tasty
Bit of the Day feature.

The week's TBTF Log entries will be mailed to TBTF subscribers on
Sunday evenings.

The email and Web editions of Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
represent my best effort to present engaging, cogent news and analysis
on what matters to the life of the Net. TBTF will continue as before,
but on a schedule closer to twice-monthly than to weekly.